Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the 2016 Levis Reading Prize
Winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain."
Review
“Whether in praise songs, appraisals or meditations, the poems of Boy with Thorn embody an ardent grace. Their accomplished structures house a fearless sensitivity. Laurentiis fills history with his ‘crucial blood,’ his ‘stubbornness,’ his ‘American tongue’; and history, in return, fills him with crucial muses (from Auden to Hayden), stubborn ghosts (such as Emmett Till), and manifold expressions of culture (southern, sexual, spiritual). The result is an extraordinary, and ultimately, irreducible debut." Terrance Hayes, judge
Review
“A rare collection that is truly timeless. In Laurentiis’s lyric, Orpheus’s rivened body is irreducibly black. Laurentiis looks back into the cave of history, and sings the ghosts into shape, ghosts undone by America’s racial discord. From slaves to queer lives ravaged by hate to those disenfranchised by Katrina, Laurentiis unflinchingly looks at the brutal lineage of a black body made into a spectacle in pain, while also questioning this looking, this singing. Sonorous and wild, emphatic and pure, Boy with Thorn is absolutely incredible.” Cathy Park Hong
Review
“A dialogue, allusive, elusive, political and charged by a novel vision, unfolds within the dark landscapes of Rickey Laurentiis’ astonishing poems in
Boy with Thorn. In this collection he writes a world and a poetics into life, creating poetry as illumination, to echo Audre Lorde, in part by discovering the light in history's and life's silences and shadows. His words are perfectly aimed flares; his sinuous syntax bears both fire and balm; the stories he tells are the precondition for a remapping of dream and desire.
Boy with Thorn shows a mind at full speed and fearless of what it might uncover, heralding a new, true talent.”
John Keene
Synopsis
Winner of the 2016 Levis Reading Prize Winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
Finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Rickey Luarentiis is a winner of a 2018 Whiting Writers Prize In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation--the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself--confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
Synopsis
In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation--the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself--confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
About the Author
Rickey Laurentiis, a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fence, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry and elsewhere. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.